


i’ll hold your hand through the worst of it

by AppleJuiz



Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Ember Island, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Friendship, Gen, Suki-centric, The Love is Stored in the Found Family, Zuko is an Awkward Turtleduck
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-08-03
Updated: 2020-08-22
Packaged: 2021-03-06 03:54:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 8,418
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25696864
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AppleJuiz/pseuds/AppleJuiz
Summary: It’s all a little ridiculous. Suki’s hardly the poster child for the well socialized, she’s been training as a warrior since she was eight years old.Sure, she grew up surrounded by girls of all ages in a supportive and close knit community. But, she was always a little on the outs. Not because of the other girls, who all liked her well enough and respected her even more. But she’s always ambitious and aggressive. She’s overly competitive and takes all sorts of things too seriously and accidentally self isolated herself for A few years there while getting really into training.But comparatively, she realizes, she’s doing pretty well. Which means it’s up to her to fix this, right?.Everyone on Team Avatar is an awkward turtleduck and Suki decides to do something about it.
Relationships: Sokka/Suki (Avatar), Suki & The Gaang (Avatar), Suki & Ty Lee (Avatar), Suki & Zuko (Avatar)
Comments: 31
Kudos: 217





	1. Sokka

**Author's Note:**

> Suki sees a maladjusted child of war and is like “is anyone gonna befriend that?” And then does it herself.

It starts for Suki, like this whole adventure has, with Sokka. 

At first it just seems like an extension of his whole Thing. His overprotectiveness is sweetly intentioned and something he’s gotten better at processing internally. Still at every meal he gets squirrelly, always checks up on her plate, shovels some of his food towards her if she finishes before him, and every night before she turns in he hands over extra blankets and pillows and she has no idea where they’re coming from. 

It’s all innocuous and sweet things like that so she just writes them off as the kind of boyfriend he is. (And if someone really pressed her, sure, it's kinda nice being taken care of by someone who knows well enough she can take care of herself, especially after a few months in a prison where things like food and blankets and care were not easily given.)

But she starts to pay attention. Starts to see the way Sokka’s always looking at everyone’s plates at meals, always pushing more food off and around. Starts to notice the way he’s always distributing things, always checking in. Can’t not notice the one night when he dumps a pile of extra blankets on Zuko before he heads off to sleep, if only for the bewildered look on Zuko’s face. 

He’s a caretaker, in a quiet way. Similar but distinct from his sister, like he is in most things. (And she tries very hard not to think to long about the two of them, the things they’ve lost and still grieve, the ways they still care, have built their own new family and still have room to bring in more, still find in themselves more to give.)

And oh, does she love this boy, and his bony elbows and goofy smiles, his big, big heart and his steady quiet leadership. She holds him a little tighter at night and buries her smile against the back of his shoulder, and warns the universe that she won’t let this go without putting up a fight so they better not try anything. 

But then it’s a little more than that. It's the way he talks sometimes, a little slower and over explaining things. It’s how sometimes when she does something like clean the dishes or pull a cool move when they’re training, he’ll pat her on the head or ruffle her hair. It’s the second after a conversation turns to the war or the comet when a dark look flickers across his face, his eyes going somewhere else, before it’s gone like it was only a trick of the campfire light, and he’s smiling again, cracking a joke. 

She watches and takes it all in, picks it all apart again and again, because he’s a puzzle she’s slowly solving, and all these little incidents are pieces but none of them are the edges she needs to start. 

It’s a few days into their time at Ember Island and she’s still passively working on this puzzle when she walks into the kitchen for lunch. 

“Suki!” Sokka calls from the other side of the room and she turns to smile at him and accidentally rams her toe on the corner of the table. 

“Shit!” she says, nearly doubling over. 

“Hey, language,” Sokka shoots back and she rights herself quick, meeting his eyes across the room and raising her eyebrows. 

“I’m sorry?” she says, giving him a Look. 

“Oh,” he says, eyes widening in realization. “Oh, you’re not twelve.”

She laughs for a second, still staring at him because yeah, no kidding, she’s not twelve. And then the realization hits her too, and she stops laughing.   


He’s only been around twelve year olds and his younger sister for the past six months.

Oh. 

Oh, that explains everything. 

“Lunch?” she asks, gesturing to the kitchen. 

“Yes,” he says, scrambling to his feet, extremely grateful that she’s changing the subject. He hurries past her, his hand brushing her waist, dropping a kiss to her temple. She feels her face flush because there is something in the way he so casually doles out affection that makes her dizzy. 

But now, she knows. And now she can do something about it. 

She’s no stranger to the pressures of being the oldest in the room. Granted, she’s only been the oldest Kyoshi Warrior for the past year and a half and she’s only the oldest by ten months. But she understands how that pressure builds, how you cut yourself off in certain ways from being comforted to be the one who comforts, how you train yourself to think in terms of the people around you and what they need from you.

And that’s what Sokka does so effortlessly. He takes care of them. With the food and the blankets and the jokes. With his bedroom in the middle of the hall, so he can keep his eyes on everyone, so they can find him easily at night. 

And they do, similarly effortless in the way they fall back on him. Katara, without any hesitation as she walks into the room and throws herself at her brother, knowing he’ll wake up and catch her and hold onto her while she shakes but doesn’t cry. Aang, as he lingers in the doorway on his tiptoes, passing back and forth like a ghost until Sokka wakes up and walks over and brings him to the bed. Toph, who won’t come to the door, but will always make some kind of noise that Sokka is finely tuned enough to hear even through the walls and will allow herself to be coaxed into sitting down and talking about nothing until she’s tired again. 

And Zuko now too, as Sokka leaves him snacks outside his door the nights they hear him pacing around, as he give out hearty pats on the shoulder during the day as a silent little comfort. 

And her, too, when she wakes up with her breath in her throat, expecting to be in a small unforgiving cell, blue fire dancing behind her eyelids. He’s always already awake, already there, his hand in hers, doesn’t even blink when she throws her arms around his neck, just catches her weight and places a steady hand on her back and holds her there.

  
“You’re okay,” he says, to her and to all of them when they need it. “I’ve got you.” And it’s a promise within itself, but she doesn’t think he knows how much it’s true. He’s got her. And that’s something that goes both ways.

She’s never been in a real romantic relationship before, and the circumstances of this one are a lot different than she’d ever imagined. But when she did imagine it, she thought about what it would mean to be a partner, to have someone, to give and take, push and pull. She thought of course in terms of fighting, in watching someone’s weak spots and having them watch hers, in sharing the defense and offense so everything is always covered, so you’d never lose. 

She never imagined Sokka, never imagined how deeply she would feel, never imagined how much she would want to take care of him.

The plan is twofold. Offense and defense.

She starts by taking on some of the weight. She already wakes up at the drop of a hat, so nights are easy to cover. Katara comes barreling in and Sokka wraps her up in blankets and his arms and she slips out to the kitchen and comes back with some water or tea, braids Katara’s hair out of her face, offers her another hand to hold until she finds her balance. Aang’s light floating footsteps start echoing in the hall and she nudges Sokka back down to the pillows and gets up, catching Aang by his bony wrists and pulling him into a tight hug, bringing him back down to the ground and then into the bedroom. Toph decides to sleep outside in the dirt and Suki starts sitting out under the stars with her until she falls asleep, leaving her extra blankets and keeping their window open, learning hear out her little sounds. 

She laughs at Zuko’s terrible jokes and makes him terrible tea that he pretends not to hate. She watches all of Aang’s airbending tricks, talks to him about Kyoshi and all her philosophies, asks him questions about what the different nations used to be like. She helps Katara with chores and with keeping everyone in line, she talks about what she remembers of her mother, talks about all the refugees she met at the ferry station. She shows Toph some basic Kyoshi forms, tries and fails to teach her how to swim, buries her in the sand every time go to the beach even after she learns how to bend the sand herself.

This is the easy part. She knows how to take care of scared children, and more importantly she cares about these specific scared children and wants to take care of them.

The second part of the plan is harder. But she is a Kyoshi Warrior and a girl in love, and so help her, she is going to make her boyfriend feel all the love she’s got aimed right at him.

“I can’t sleep,” she says one night, pressing her cheek into his shoulder. He can’t either, she knows, because he keeps tossing and turning and kicking the blankets around and then apologizing for kicking the blankets around. “I keep thinking I’m going to wake up back in my cell.”

“Oh,” he exhales, turning toward her, his hand reaching for her wrist, his touch saying, “I’ve got you and I’m not letting go.”

She sighs, lets him pull her close and runs her hands along his sides, hoping she can get her fingers to say the same. 

“You know, I still don’t even know what I hated more, being tortured by Azula or being stuck in that stupid prison for so long,” she says, shaking her head. “Like at least when I was being tortured I had something to do. And Azula is far from an engaging conversationalist, but none of the other inmates were really looking to make friends.”

“I’m so sorry,” he chokes out. She shakes her head, reaching a hand up to brush through his hair.

“Don’t apologize,” she says. “I’m not telling you because I want you to do or feel something about it. It’s just… nice to talk, so I don’t have to keep it all inside.”

He nods, but she can still feel the tension in his shoulders.

“Why can’t you sleep?” she asks softly, like she’s sneaking the question in and if she says it in a whisper he won’t even notice what she’s doing. 

He hums and shrugs. 

_ C’mon _ , she thinks.  _ Talk to me. I’m not twelve, I’m not your sister, I’m yours and I’m here. Let me in _ .

“I’m scared,” he says, and she takes it for the weighty confession it is, takes it on, ready and stable.

“Of what?” 

He exhales. “Do you want the short list or the long list?” 

“Long list,” she says, trying not to sound too eager. “We’ve got time.”

“Well, we don’t,” he says with a groan. “And that’s the problem. We’re so out of time. I feel like I’m still waiting for the eclipse and the invasion to happen, like we’re falling behind the schedule and we need to get back on track.”

She nods and reaches her hand down to find his hand, lace their fingers together. “You thought it was going to work,” she guesses. “And since it didn’t, it’s unresolved, incomplete.”

“I can’t believe I thought it was going to work,” he says, tipping his forehead into her neck.

“Hey,” she says, knocking her knuckles against his arm. “It was good. It was smart. It wasn’t your fault.”

“I thought it was all going to work,” he says again, shaking his head. “And now I don’t know if anything ever will. I can’t be the first person who thought they were going to end the war, who thought their plan was going to do it.”

She aches for him, feels her heart breaking, feels the pressure in her chest as she picks this part of him up, the failure, the loss, the fear, and adds it to her own.

“We have Aang now,” she offers. “That’s more than anyone else has had.”

“Even with Aang,” he says. “We still got played. I got played. Everytime I think we’re ahead, we’re still three moves behind and the next time we try won’t be any different, and we were lucky enough to survive the eclipse.”

“Hey,” she says, pulling back to press her forehead to his. “Next time will be different. Because next time you’ll have me. And I don’t like to lose.”

Miraculously, he cracks a grin. 

“You really don’t,” he says, and she shakes her head and kisses him gently. Because no she doesn’t, and this, right here, is what winning feels like.

It also feels like winning the next morning, the next night, the next week. Because it seems to have snapped into place for him, what this is, what they are and what they can be. 

She’s got him. And just like that, just as easy as that, he falls back onto her, trusting that she’ll catch him. When he’s tossing and turning, when he shoots up in the middle of the night breathing heavy. When the conversation turns to the war and the mood gets dark, in the second before he goes to crack a joke, to calm everyone down, she reaches for his hand and holds on. When he gets lost in his own mood, his own guilts and fears, she gives her best attempt at a punchline to pull him back away from the void. He talks it out, memories good and bad, plans and inventions, hopes and dreams and fears, everything he’s held in for months and years. And she does the same, and they learn how to walk while leaning on each other, how to balance while holding each other’s weight.

“Thank you,” he says, one morning, when they’re both pretending to still be asleep for just another few minutes, to stay in bed and leech warmth off each other and the sheets. 

“For what?” she asks, peeking one eye open, the other still smushed into a pillow.

“I don’t know,” he says. “For being here.”

She presses her foot against his shin and thinks about how she wants to be here, right next to him, forever. 

“Not a problem.”

  
  
  
  
  



	2. Zuko

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Did I write this fic with this specific chapter in mind? Yes, yes I did.

One of their first days on Ember Island, she wakes Sokka up early to watch the sunrise. He grunts and groans and she has to all but drag him out of the bed and down to the porch, where he promptly passes out again with his head against her stomach. 

She cards her fingers through his hair, feels his chest rise and fall beneath her hand, and tries to match her breaths with his. 

It’s quiet and calm and the sky is a collage of light beautiful colors. 

She can’t not hear the slight creak of footsteps though and turns finding Zuko in the doorway, awkwardly trying to back away. 

“Uh,” he says, freezing in place. “Hi. It’s, uh, me. Zuko.”

“Hi,” she says back slowly. “I know.” Sokka grumbles against her stomach and flops an arm out in an approximation of a wave. “We’re watching the sunrise.”

“Right,” he says, nodding. “I’ll leave you guys too it.” He looks like he wants to make a run for it, and she kinda wants to make him squirm because yes, he’s saved her life a few times now but he still did burn down her village. 

“You should join us,” she says. “So I’m not the only one watching.”

“‘M watching,” Sokka insists. “Too pretty, hurts my eyes.”

She rolls her eyes. Zuko comes over and sits around ten feet away from them, legs crossed under him. He shifts about a few dozen times before settling, like this is the first time he’s ever sat down in his life. 

“Firebenders get their power from the sun,” Zuko offers after a moment of silence. “Though it’s not like with waterbenders and the moon since they learned how to waterbend from the moon and firebenders learned from the dragons originally.” She hums softly, and he nods to himself. There’s barely a breath before he’s continuing. “Uh, did you know that there are actually still dragons? Aang and I found some a few weeks ago and learned how to firebend from them. A lot of people call my uncle the Dragon of the West because they thought he killed the last dragon, but he didn’t actually, he learned how to firebend from them too and then kept their existence a secret. He’s really cool. I’m talking too much, aren’t I?”

He is. 

“He sounds pretty cool,” Suki says instead, leaning back on her free hand. “I can’t say I know much about firebending. Or any bending really. Kyoshi is pretty isolated from the rest of the world and we haven’t had any benders on the island in years. Kinda ironic, I guess.”

“Because she was the Avatar?” he asks. 

“Yeah, because she’s the Avatar,” she says and thinks that this might be the weirdest conversation she’s ever had with someone. They lapse into a long silence, but every few seconds Zuko makes a noise like he’s going to say something and then doesn’t. Eventually Sokka wakes up and starts bulldozing his way through a conversation, but she has a feeling she hasn’t even scratched the surface.

Zuko is, for all intents and purposes, a relatively unknown entity for her by the time they settle in at the beach house. She trusts him, but he still seems so aloof and indiscernible. He’s the former prince of the Fire Nation, banished and then defected. It’s all very serious and important and dramatic and she doesn’t know how to figure him out. 

And then she watches this exact exchange a day into their stay.

“I wonder what kind of flowers these are?” Sokka says, closely examining a string of small white blossoms beside a bush in the courtyard. 

“One time when Uncle and I were traveling he ate some poisoned flower,” Zuko offers unprompted. “Well he didn’t actually eat it, he just brewed some tea with it, but… yeah, he had rashes everywhere.”

Sokka hums and turns away from the flowers. 

“When we were in the desert, I drank some bad cactus juice and started hallucinating,” he says in response, and she already has whiplash from how this conversation is spinning around her. “It was right after Appa got taken actually, so we were stuck walking the whole way in the heat and had nothing to drink. It sucked.”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” Zuko says, gaze shifting around awkwardly. 

“Why? It wasn’t your fault.” 

“No!” Zuko replies quickly, his eyes widening, like it’s actually under question. “No, of course not.”

“Better not be,” he says, raising his eyebrows, joking, but it just makes Zuko more defensive.

“I really didn’t.”

“Good,” Sokka says, teasingly pointing his finger, but Zuko genuinely gulps and opens his mouth to presumably clarify the point again. 

“Oh no,” Suki says, out loud, watching the whole thing in a horrified awe. 

They turn and she finds all that awkward energy pointing right at her. 

“You okay?” Sokka asks, his hand finding hers easily.

“Yeah,” she says, nodding quickly. Except no she isn’t because they’re both disasters who’ve never talked to people their own age successfully, and it looks like she’s going to have to do something about this. 

Which is ridiculous. She’s hardly the poster child for the well socialized, she’s been trained as a warrior since she was eight years old. 

Sure, she grew up surrounded by girls of all ages in a supportive and close knit community. But even with that already, she was always a little on the outs. Not because of the other girls, who all liked her well enough and respected her even more. But she’s always more ambitious and aggressive. She’s overly competitive and takes all sorts of things too seriously and accidentally self isolated herself for several years there while getting really into training. 

But comparatively, she realizes, she’s doing pretty well. Which means it’s up to her to fix this, right? 

She spars with Zuko one morning while Aang is water bending down at the beach. He manages to get a good block in, sending her sword clattering to the ground. It’s not the first time he’s won a match but they’re rare enough that he looks pleased and a little smug. 

She feels her chest burn angrily the way it always does when she fails at something, clenches her teeth hard and wrinkles her nose. 

“Well, that move is super easy if you have two swords,” she says, crossing her arms over her chest. 

And see, that’s where Sokka would roll his eyes and smile that smug little grin of his because he knows every competitive perfectionist inch of her and likes her still. And beyond that, Sokka still knows the way it’s fun to snap back and forth with friends, letting your bark be bigger than your bite, letting yourself get pointlessly surface-level mad and say stupid things without meaning. 

But she’s not talking to Sokka. She’s talking to Zuko. 

He ducks his head and nods solemnly. “Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, you’re right, sorry.”

And she all but smacks her forehead, barely resists the urge to throw her arms back and stare at the sky and scream. 

“That was a joke,” she says, walking over to pick up her sword. “Or well, not a joke. I was just trash talking, you know?”

Except he obviously doesn’t, because he just kinda watches her with wary eyes and says, “Sure.”

She sighs to herself because this is her job now, she’s just decided, and it’s going to be very challenging. 

“I’m a pretty sore loser,” she explains. “But if I win too much I get bored. It’s a whole complex.” 

“Okay,” Zuko says slowly, like he’s not sure what to do with the information. “My sister’s a pretty sore loser.” Suki winces because she can’t help it. And then Zuko winces too, realizing the baggage of a statement like that. “Not that you’re anything like her! Just, one time when we were little I beat her at pai sho and she set the board on fire and we never played ever again. She really doesn’t like losing.”

And she doesn’t know what to say to that so she says nothing and then there’s a horrible silence lingering in the air as they just stare at each other. 

“Let’s go again,” she says, eventually, and he audibly sighs in relief. 

So she’s going to have to try a little harder. 

And as always when things are more difficult than she originally assumes, she falls back on her Kyoshi training. She’s a fearless warrior, a prepared and noble leader. She’s been training since she was eight, she’s led dozens of girls into dozens of battles, and she’s been to more slumber parties than she can count. 

“C’mon,” she says, pulling Sokka out of the bed they share. It’s past midnight and the kids are all finally asleep. Sokka insists he’d also like to be asleep, but she bites her lower lip and says, “Please.” 

She’s still pretty surprised when it works that easily. 

“Why are we going to Zuko’s room?” he asks and she shushes him, pushing the door open quietly. Zuko’s still awake, sitting on the edge of his bed and sharpening one of his blades. 

“Oh,” he says, looking up at them. “Hi. Is everything okay?”

“I dunno, I’ve lost control of the situation,” Sokka says. Suki rolls her eyes and digs her elbow into his side. 

“We're going down to the beach,” she says definitively. 

“Uh, okay,” Zuko says, blinking at them and not moving at all. 

She swallows a scream. 

“You are coming with us to the beach,” she says. 

He frowns, glancing between the two of them. “Oh, uh, why?” 

And yeah, it might be nice to sneak off to the beach with her boyfriend so they can spend some time together not in a house they share with a bunch of kids and the former prince of the Fire Nation, but that’s not what tonight is about it, tonight is about teenage friendships and normal people bonding because it is desperately needed. 

“Because,” she says, tilting her head. “It’s going to be fun, come on.”  
He puts his sword down. 

The beach is so dark it’s almost impossible to distinguish the black of the water from the black of the sky. The moon is a small little crescent way above them, but she doesn’t look up too long, doesn’t want to think about celestial bodies and the implications therein. 

She pulls her shirt off instead. 

“Um,” Zuko says, physically turning around to not look at her. 

“Uh,” Sokka says as well, not turning around. She can barely make out the flush on his cheeks, but smiles at it all the same. 

“The Kyoshi Warriors have a coming of age tradition,” she explains, kicking off her shorts as well. “All of the girls who turn fifteen go down to the beach together at midnight on the winter solstice and go into the water together and tell a secret they’ve never told anyone before.”

“That seems like a terrible idea,” Sokka says. He probably can see as much as she can, which is to say not much, but she sends him a look anyway. 

“Uh, and it’s also not the winter solstice or midnight, and we’re all older than fifteen,” Zuko offers, still pointedly not looking at her. 

“And neither of you are Kyoshi Warriors,” she says. She moves over to Sokka because he’ll be an easier sell and she trusts Zuko will succumb to the peer pressure. “But it’s tradition, and about trusting your fellow warrior on and off the battlefield. So we should do it.”

“But I already trust you,” Sokka says sweetly, so easily leaning his head towards hers, she almost forgets what it was like to not have someone she was this comfortable with. 

She sighs and reaches for the hem of his shirt. 

“It’s also a lot of fun,” she says, tugging on his shirt gently. His hands meet hers and he takes over, pulling his shirt off while she steps back. 

“Fun?” Zuko echoes skeptically. 

She kicks a little sand at his shins. “C’mon,” she says. “Not as fun as breaking out of prison, but it’s definitely better than sitting around sharpening swords.”

He sighs and turns around slowly, pointedly meeting her eyes. “Do I have to take my clothes off?” he asks. 

“You do if you don’t want to walk back in a wet shirt.”

He groans but pulls his shirt off anyway, like it’s some big effort and he's not always strutting around shirtless. 

She rolls her eyes and heads for the edge of the water, feeling some power down to her bones knowing they’re going to follow her. 

It’s a lot different than the first time she did this, in so many different ways. They fall into a line at the shore, just behind the line of the waves, and there’s that familiar air of excitement and uncertainty and conspiracy that she remembers, that feeling of being with other kids, equals, that belonging feeling. 

“Ready?” she asks.

“No,” Sokka says. But she knows him and knows exactly how to give him a look that’s a dare and a taunt and a tease. And then she turns and sprints for the water, knowing just like that that they’re going to follow her.

She’s lived on an island her entire life. She knows the push and pull of the tide in her bones, the respect that the ocean commands. She knows the way her legs strain as she pushes through the shallow water at the shore, and she knows even in the dark, the exact crest of the wave that approaches, the exact timing of her dive that’ll cut her right through the water.

It’s freezing water, shocking through to her entire system, she feels every single inch of her skin, every strand of her hair in the cold as she holds her breath and kicks for the surface. She breaks through and gasps in air that stings on her wet skin, and she feels awake and alive and electrified but in a distinctly good way. 

She turns back to face the shore and watches Sokka get barreled down by the next wave and come up spluttering and swearing. Zuko takes a more deliberate approach, clomping slowly through the waist deep water, keeping his arms above the water and hopping over the waves as they come. 

“This is the worst,” Sokka accuses, paddling over to her. She dives back down and kicks some water up at him. 

“How long do we have to do this for?” Zuko asks, like he’s suffering through it even though she can blatantly see the little huffs of steam he’s making.

“Cheater!” Sokka accuses and splashes at him. 

“Until we all tell our secrets,” she says. “I’ll go first.” Because she’s thought this through a lot and it’s important to set a good tone. Traditionally, confessions are deep and extremely personal, exposing traumas and fears. It’s a trust exercise and a way to understand the depths of your fellow warriors, in order to protect each other physically and emotionally. And that’s great, but that’s not what tonight is supposed to be. So she needs to ace the set up. “Okay, obviously this is something I’ve never told anyone before. When I was twelve I had a crush on this girl in my class, and one day I stole her favorite book from her bag so I could read it and impress her with it. But I forgot to put the book back at the end of the day and she got so angry asking about who took it, that I panicked and threw it into the ocean. She cried for almost a whole week, and I felt so guilty about it that I never spoke to her ever again.”

The words go out, into the night, into the sea, washed away. 

“You threw it into the ocean?” Zuko echoes, sounding so scandalized she almost laughs. 

“What book was it?” Sokka asks, humming thoughtfully. 

“Hey,” she says, pushing some water at him. “This isn’t a judgement or questions thing, okay? Sokka, your turn.”

He sighs, and she knows that no matter what she will be getting questions about the book all night. 

“Okay, fine, got one,” he says, hopping over a bigger wave as it passes. “When I was really little, I found this injured seal turtle baby outside the village and hid him under my bed for three weeks. I fed him my dinner like every night and made this horrible cast out of blankets for his fin and kept trying to train him to balance stuff on his nose. And then Katara woke up in the middle of the night and saw him and she absolutely lost it, cuz she thought there was a monster under my bed. So I set him free the next morning and no one ever knew.”

Her teeth are chattering but she smiles anyway, bobbing up over the waves. 

“One time, Azula pushed me out of a tree and I broke my wrist,” Zuko says. She winces and ducks her head into the water. This was too ambitious. Talking about the past is tricky for any of them, but Zuko especially. “And for the whole time I was injured, the kitchen staff felt so bad for me, so they made these special cookies that are usually only for special holidays and celebrations. And they’re really good. So around a month later I pretended to sprain my ankle in training. And then pretended it was still sprained for around two weeks after. And I ate a lot of cookies.”

They float in silence for a second, the story lingering in the air. A breeze cuts across the beach and a larger wave brushes past them and crashes softly into the sand.

And Suki laughs, light and breathless.

“See, that wasn’t so hard, was it?” she says, for herself too, because yeah, this is working isn’t it?

“Can we go now?” Zuko asks.

“If you want to be a wimp about it,” she says, diving under the next wave that comes, splashing at Zuko when she comes back up.

And yeah, there’s a war going on and they’re staying in a lavish beach house and everything is uncertain and they could all be dead in a few weeks. But this feels like a victory, watching Zuko splash back, watching Sokka throw a limp piece of seaweed and have it fly back into his face. 

She leans back, floating in the water, letting the waves bounce her up and down. Her teeth are chattering and drops of water freeze on her skin. But this is a victory.

Zuko gets out first and makes a fire on the shore. She’s the last one to come out and the night air is unforgiving. But the fire is warm, and she drops into Sokka’s lap, finds herself in a mess of wet limbs and cold sticky skin, buries her feet in the sand and shivers under the stars. 

“But they didn’t cook them to make it symbolic of how they didn’t actually boil Aang in oil,” Sokka is telling Zuko. “So they tasted gross.”

“It sounds gross,” he agrees.

“I ate like ten and got super sick the rest of the night.”

“Why?”

Sokka shrugs and hooks his chin over her shoulder. “They were free cookies.”

“Well, you guys should definitely try the ones back at home,” Zuko says and any other night it would make them quiet and sullen, make them think about the war and the Fire Nation and what home even means to them before or after this. 

But not tonight. Tonight it sounds like a promise, that one day they will be sitting around together and eating cookies.

Every few days, she’ll wake up at dawn and slip out of bed, leave Sokka to his beauty sleep and meet Zuko on the porch to watch the sunrise. It’s where she gets most of her work with him done, brute forcing their way through conversations until they start to smooth out all the awkward edges. 

Progress is incremental, but steady. They talk about the weather at first. They talk about the sunrise and about the others and basic pleasantries. Slowly she gets him to start exchanging stories, learns a lot about his uncle, eventually gets a full ten minute rant out of him about Love Amongst the Dragons and why the Ember Island Players got literally every single thing wrong about the themes of the play. 

They tiptoe around certain topics, a list starting and ending with his sister. 

But they talk about Boiling Rock sometimes, about their mothers, about the war.

“I’m sorry,” he says one morning, staring wistfully out at the distant sun. “For your village.” He groans and buries his face in his hands. “I feel like no matter how many people I apologize to there’s always more that I did wrong. And I can help Aang learn to firebend and help Sokka and help Katara, but then there’s still you and Toph and everyone else on Kyoshi Island and so many people in the Earth Kingdom, in the Southern Water Tribe, the Northern Water Tribe. And I don’t know how to make up for it all.”

She takes a sip of tea and knocks her shoulder into his. 

“I do forgive you,” she says, shrugging. “But I can’t tell you that everyone you’ve hurt will. And I don’t forgive you because you’ve done some singular thing to make amends to me specifically, but because I can see that you’ve changed, and that you’re trying. Doing good is a choice, just like doing bad is, but it’s not a choice you should make for other people, it’s a choice you make for yourself. You can’t personally make amends to everyone you’ve ever hurt, but you can continue to choose to do good, so you can live with yourself.”

“But how can I live with everything I’ve already done wrong?”

She shrugs. “Everyone has regrets. But you can’t control your past. You can only control your present.”

He runs his hands through his hair and sits up a little straighter. “You sound like my uncle.”

It’s the highest possible compliment and she smiles into his cup.

“I feel like your uncle would have had more metaphors,” she offers. He grins and nods. 

They sit for a second, and this is another thing that’s taken a while, these comfortable silences.

“What do you regret?” he asks, when the sun is mostly in the sky and they should head back inside for breakfast with the others.

“Oh, me?” she says, glancing over at him and raising her eyebrows. “No, I’ve never done anything wrong ever.”

He rolls his eyes. “You’re spending too much time with Sokka.”

They spar. 

They’re pretty good at it, obviously. They can go longer and longer these days without a winner, sometimes they even call a draw to keep matches from being unreasonably long. 

This is one of those times, and it’s not as terrible as the first few times where she would struggle against the urge to tease him or he would attempt to trash talk and miss the mark entirely, insults always too small or way too big. 

“I can’t believe you actually cut my shirt,” he complains, poking his finger through the hole and frowning. 

She wipes the sweat off her forehead with her sleeve, and rolls her eyes. “Well at least you’re actually wearing a shirt today.”

“I run hot.”

“Yeah you do,” she says, wiggling her eyebrows. He scowls and throws a sweat rag at her face.

“I hate you.”

“Yeah, well you’re making lunch for me anyway,” she says, leading the way back inside and to the kitchen. 

“Uh, it’s definitely your turn to make lunch,” he says, tucking his swords away as he follows her up the steps. 

“Yeah, well you burned down my village,” she says, flashing him a smile.

He sighs deeply. “Fine.”

And that’s a goddamn success story. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Suki and Zuko are a massively underrated friendship that I'm obsessed with. Thanks so much for reading! Let me know what you think and I'll have the next chapter soon.


	3. Ty Lee

After the war, after reuniting with her Warriors, after Zuko’s coronation, she wakes up one morning and feels in her soul that she’s ready to go home. 

So she hugs her friends goodbye, kisses Sokka long and deep, and she and the girls set out. Leading the Warriors again feels like a homecoming in itself, being surrounded with her sisters, with the girls she grew up alongside and trained alongside. It makes everything snap into focus, because this is what it was all for. 

And then there’s Ty Lee. 

She’s new but she’s integrated herself quickly into the group which is impressive considering their… complicated history. Personally Suki is willing to let fistfights on prison gondolas be bygones but she doesn’t not wonder how Ty Lee bonded with the other warriors. 

“She’s nice,” her second in command Ren says towards the beginning of their trip as Ty Lee walks across camp on her hands. “But a little weird.”

And that’s really what it comes down to. 

All the girls get compliments all the time from Ty Lee. 

“Your hair is so pretty,” is what Suki gets one night before Ty Lee does a backflip and heads to her tent. 

“Your eyelashes are so long,” is another as they offload their bags from a ferry. 

“Thanks,” Suki says, and learns to not question it too much. 

They get back to the Island and she sets Ty Lee up with her own room in the Warriors quarters. They start training the next morning at sunrise. She’s an eager learner, already flexible enough to move through forms. 

“You’re too precise,” Suki offers at the beginning of their second week. She moves into the stance she’s trying to teach, moves loosely through some motions. “You can aim for specific points with your chi blocking, but the Kyoshi style is about being loose and being sturdy, not hitting pressure points but moving things where you want them to go with the least amount of force of your own.”

Ty Lee nods eagerly and mimicked every move she makes, still very rigid but a near perfect mirror. 

Outside of training they don’t talk a lot, just smile when they pass around the island, sometimes exchange an offhand comment about Zuko. There used to be traditions for integrating older Warriors, but it’s been a while since anyone older than 10 decided to join. It’s also been a while since there were older Warriors, but Suki celebrates a quiet birthday a few weeks inand thinks about how things certainly are changing. 

Sokka visits. She meets him on the beach, crashing into each other like it’s been years and not a month and a half, like a married couple reuniting after years and not two teenagers who have only spent a few collective weeks together. 

It’s far from the longest they’ve ever been apart, too, but that was before Boiling Rock and Ember Island and the war ships and all the individual moments therein where she fell deeper and harder than she had any right too. 

The girls are all very entertained by Sokka as always. By him in general which is understandable, but also by her reactions to him which is not fair, it’s not her fault she’s this disgustingly in love. 

“So how’s Ty Lee?” he asks one afternoon while they’re doing dishes after lunch. (It’s close to domestic, washing and drying side by side, hands brushing and hips bumping but she’s not about to lose it over dishwashing, she’s fine.) 

“She’s doing good,” she replies. But like a lot of Sokka’s questions, it makes her think. She’s doing good in training, the girls like her, the villagers like her, which was easy enough since she never burned the place down. 

But there are a few little things. She’s nice but a little weird. She never says no to things, always taking on any extra tasks, extra hours on patrols, cleaning up the common areas, putting away equipment after training. Someone asks and she says yes and then the girls are all used to it, but Ty Lee is running around for eighteen hours a day if not longer, bubbly as always but a little frazzled too. 

“Does she seem okay?” she asks Sokka a few seconds later, still thinking. Her girls are her responsibility and Ty Lee is one of her girls now. She usually trusts herself to notice when someone needs help but where she knows all the other girls’ tells from years of practice, Ty Lee is an unknown quantity. 

Sokka just shrugs though. “I dunno. I don’t really know her outside of trying to kill us so…”

“She was friends with Azula,” she says. She dries her hands and passes the towel off to him. “That probably wasn’t fun.”

“Probably not,” he says. “Probably more fun than being her enemy though.”

“Yeah,” she says, watching his hands as he folds the towel and drapes it on the counter.

“You’re gonna do the thing, aren’t you?” he asks.

She frowns, drawing her eyebrows together. “What thing?”

“The Suki thing, where you go around helping any person or animal you find in emotional crisis,” he says. 

“That’s my thing?” 

“That and punching people good.”

She smiles and steps in quick to plant a kiss on the corner of his mouth. His hands brush across her hips, holding her in place for a second to kiss her for real before she slips out of his grip.

He pouts but she heads for the door.

“Sorry. I’ve gotta go do my thing.”

Direct intervention is a good approach to start with. She keeps her eyes on Ty Lee and what she’s doing on the day to day, and makes a plan from there. 

“Hey, Ty Lee, can you help with equipment?” a girl asks her after training one day.

“Sure thing!” she says, bounding over. 

“Ty Lee helped yesterday, Min,” Suki calls from across the room. And the day before, and the day before, but no one besides her or Ty Lee seems to notice that. But just as easy as that Min gets someone else to help and Ty Lee leaves with the other girls. 

She keeps her eye on it, making sure Ty Lee only takes one extra shift a week, doesn’t trade for a night shift more than once, never takes on too many extra tasks cleaning. It’s working for the most part and she’s content to just leave it at that. Problem solved.

But of course it’s never that easy, is it?

“Do you trust me?” Ty Lee asks one morning, gnawing on her lower lip and shifting her weight around uncomfortably. She looks small and not fearful but uncertain beneath her Kyoshi colors in the early peaceful morning light. 

“Yes,” Suki says firmly, and thinks about the dozens of other things she could say, explanations and questions and reassurances. But she takes a breath and leaves it at that, keeps her face a blank slate and her eyes on Ty Lee’s.

“Okay,” she says, voice light and bouncy as ever. “Thanks.”

Suki smiles back at her, but goes back to the drawing board. “Let’s work with your fans today.”

Okay, so intervention is not enough, she needs to do some actual talking. She’s not sure what an emotional conversation with Ty Lee would look like, and she’s not confident she can charge headlong into this. Because the problem is of course Azula, who Suki would rather not think about at all if possible let alone talk about with anyone except Sokka.

(She tried one conversation with Zuko, after, about what happens when a person is raised to play people like chess pieces, to value power before anything else and then perfection slightly above it. There are things she can bring herself to understand from afar, abstract thoughts about how there are no winners in wars. But then Zuko says, “She’s my sister.” in a tone that she can’t parse. But then she remembers the heat and the burns and the months she spent in a cell. And then she compartmentalizes and also decides to not talk about it again.)

So she moves around it. 

“As a Kyoshi Warrior,” she explains another morning, during one of their small breaks. “Your responsibility is to the group as a whole always, before all else.” Ty Lee nods along eagerly. “For example, after the war, when I was reunited with the rest of the Warriors, I took full responsibility for our capture and I offered my resignation.”

“What?” Ty Lee asks, eyes wide. “But you guys were so good, and you’re an amazing leader!”

“Thank you,” she says. “And I don’t regret that fight at all, or any of what happened after. It’s a sacrifice I was willing to make and would make again. But it’s a choice that I made and that all of the Kyoshi Warriors paid the price for. It was our biggest loss in decades, and as a group, the others had the right to decide how they felt about my leadership.”

Ty Lee nods slowly, and Suki’s not sure if this is working but it’s important anyway.

“We’re a team,” she finishes. “My job as a leader is to represent the will of the Warriors as a whole. If I’m not doing that, I’m no longer fit to lead.”

“That’s really cool,” Ty Lee says, glancing down at the fan in her hand. And Suki recognizes the look. She’s seen it on almost every girl she’s even trained, remembers when she felt it in her own training, the moment when she realized that being a Kyoshi Warrior is no light thing. That it’s more than just fighting and forms, it’s a mentality, an identity, a community and all the responsibilities therein.

“Alright, let’s go again,” she says, picking up her own fans, feeling their comfortable and natural weight in her hands. 

It’s a step in the right direction. 

Ty Lee moves more meaningfully around the island, finally makes it through a full meditation session, takes on tasks that she deems important, asks for help redecorating her room, finds a place for herself in the common areas and at meals. 

She still follows the other girls around a lot, follows Suki around even more, doesn’t speak up often aside from her usual compliments and general excitement. 

That’s an easy enough fix.

She makes sure they team up for a training exercise, an all terrain practice match against another two girls. 

“What should we do?” she asks Ty Lee before the match starts.

“I dunno,” she says, tilting her head. “What should we do?”

Suki shrugs. “I’m not sure. They’re both strong. I can’t really think of a good plan.”

_ Come on _ , she thinks, putting on her best puzzled face. This is her thing now and she’s gonna get it right with Ty Lee.

“Well,” Ty Lee says, glancing around and pursing her lips tight. “Um… There are some trees over there that I can scale super easily. I can probably move between them too, that might give me a height advantage.”

Suki nods. “What do you need me to do?” 

Ty Lee blinks. “Ren carries her stance low,” she says. “It’ll be hard to throw her off balance from too far above. If I distract her, you can catch her off guard.” It’s raised at the end like a question, but that’s something they can work on later.

“I like that plan,” Suki says. 

Ty Lee smiles.

They win the match. 

The next morning Ty Lee comes in for training but Suki sets her fans down.

“Show me how to chi block?” she asks.

Something crosses Ty Lee’s expression, a complicated heavy kind of emotion that isn’t for Suki to understand, but reassures her that she’s doing this right. “Okay!” 

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you so much for reading!! Please let me know what you think and what you might like to see.


End file.
